Healthy at Work - What are the benefits to business?

When businesses proactively improve their working environments by organising work in ways that promote health, all adverse health-related outcomes, including absence and injuries, decrease.

• Sickness absence costs UK employers around £12.2 billion each year. Between 2% and 16% of the annual UK salary bill is spent on sickness absence
• The cost of making reasonable adjustments to keep an employee who develops a health condition or disability will almost certainly be far lower than the cost of recruiting and training a new employee
• Stress-related conditions and musculoskeletal disorders are now the most common reported causes of sickness absence from work in the UK
• An estimated 34 million days a year are lost in England and Wales through sickness absence resulting from smoking-related illness
• Physical inactivity has major health consequences - including obesity, coronary heart disease and cancer - and in England is estimated to cost the wider economy £8.2 billion per year
• Alcohol misuse among employees in England costs up to £6.4 billion a year in lost productivity through increased absenteeism, unemployment and premature death

The Government's Health, Work and Well-being Strategy encourages and supports employers in initiatives to improve the health and wellbeing of working age people. It found implementing health promotion measures could lead to a saving of 34% in absenteeism costs, concluding that every pound spent on promoting health in the workplace could lead to a £2.50 saving for businesses.